Joe Brockmeier Archive

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at
jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.

This probably won't come as a surprise to many, but the "social Web browser" has thrown in the towel. Don't cry for the Flock team - they're flying the coop for Zynga to go make Facebook games or something. But Flock's loyal fans are out in the cold. Why'd Flock fail? There's a few lessons to be learned.

Looking for a good, cheap Android tablet? Lots of folks recommend grabbing a Barnes & Noble Color Nook and then rooting it to make an Android tablet. Is it worth it? Depends on what you expect from a tablet computer.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Case in point: Vendors can take a hefty cut of the profits from applications sold through their app stores or shipped by default. But should they?

Who has two thumbs and isn't at all surprised at Nokia throwing MeeGo under the bus? This guy. The Nokia partnership with Microsoft is appalling and bad news for MeeGo, but not a surprise at all. What comes next? That's up to Intel.

If you're looking for excitement, the openSUSE 11.4 release is probably not for you. On the other hand, Linux users who like boring, dependable, and usable should look a bit more closely. While openSUSE isn't chock full of changes, it does provide a solid no-nonsense distro for the adult in you.

Forget Godot, we're waiting for CentOS 6. If you hoped to have a shiny new CentOS release under the Christmas tree, you were disappointed. 2010 slipped by, still no release. Hoping to surprise your honey with CentOS 6 on Valentine's Day? Maybe. If you're lucky.

It's not the best-known distribution, but Mepis still has its fans. The Debian-based distro is getting very close to its final 11 release. With a major version bump (last release was 8.5) Mepis 11 has a lot to live up to.

Yes, it's that time of year. Eggnog, fruitcake, tangled lights, crowded stores, bad weather — and the annual industry retrospectives. You can't argue with tradition, though, and 2010 was a very interesting year for Linux and open source. Let's take a look back at 2010 and see whether it was naughty or nice.

Linux Mint is back and better than ever with the Linux Mint 10 release. Though it's not a massive update on Linux Mint 9, this comes with enough polish and new features that it's well worth the upgrade.

Ever wonder who contributes the most to the Linux kernel? Of course you have. Here's a hint: It's not Canonical, certainly not Microsoft, and you might be surprised which companies crack the top 20 and where.

The OpenOffice.org fork continues to move forward. The Document Foundation recently released LibreOffice beta 3, with a set of modest user-facing improvements, and more under-the-hood work. Can LibreOffice overtake OpenOffice.org? Chances look very good.

Now under VMware's wing, Zimbra has released Zimbra Desktop 2.0 productivity client. Zimbra Desktop 2.0's main feature is email, so we decided to see how it stacks up against Gmail. The verdict? Google probably isn't too worried.

Users sick of waiting on Amazon to provide current downloaders for Linux will be pleased with Banshee 1.8. Just released, the new version can browse the Amazon MP3 store and act as a downloader for Amazon's .amz files, plus a number of other new enhancements and features.

Just a few weeks after Oracle put OpenSolaris out to pasture, the OpenIndiana folks have pushed out their first release. Is it worth a look? Depends on how exciting you find OpenSolaris, but it's not going to knock Ubuntu off the desktop.

Dell's 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw.

It's hard to believe that Debian has 17 years under its belt, but the project celebrated its 17th birthday on August 16. Though Debian may not be quite as well hyped as other distros, it's still one of the most important FOSS projects around.

After months of silence, OpenSolaris supporters have had enough and launched the Illumos project. Described as a "spork" of OpenSolaris, rather than a true fork, Illumos is a misguided attempt to keep the Solaris legacy OS alive for another generation. Too bad it's doomed from the start.

Firefox has been taking heat from Google Chrome over speed for some time, but the world's most popular open source browser is getting ready for a comeback. Can Firefox 4.0 woo back some of the early adopters who've embraced Chrome? It looks like it will have a very good shot.

Opera 10.60 beta is out the door, and they've reinstated Linux as a first-class citizen for releases. The latest release has more speed, WebM support, and Geolocation for users who want everyone to know exactly where they are when posting from Twitter.

Flock has undergone a major evolution in the last year. From the Swiss-Army knife of social media to a slimmed down browser that tackles Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube only. Even more shocking, the project has dumped Firefox for Chromium. Was the switch worth it?

If something doesn't work, try something else. That's a lesson that the FSF needs to embrace, if it wants to succeed with a mainstream audience. Being the Party of Gno, and trying to tell users to just avoid Windows, Cloud Computing, iPads, and proprietary software isn't cutting it. It's time to come up with credible alternatives or be satisfied with remaining irrelevant to the majority of users.

When you install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition in October, don't look for Firefox on the desktop  it won't be there. Chromium, Chrome's open source cousin, is going to be taking its place. After years of desktop dominance on Linux, is Firefox losing its foothold or is this an anomaly?

With Facebook stomping all over users' privacy, there's been a lot of interest in open source and privacy friendly social network tools. The good news is that Mozilla is getting involved with a new platform called sudoSocial. The bad news is that sudoSocial is very new, and not quite sure what it wants to be when it grows up.

You win some, you lose some. The Mozilla project has won big with Firefox, but not so much with Thunderbird. Thunderbird 3 is a decent mail user agent, but it doesn't seem to have the right stuff to break out into widespread usage.

The long struggle for open video on the Web may finally be over for Linux users. Last week, Google announced WebM at its Google I/O conference. What's it mean for you? In the long run, a totally open media format for the Web, plus the backing of enough companies and organizations to push open media over the top online.

Now that Songbird has abandoned Linux, where will we turn for a browser-based music fix? Not to worry, you can still find plenty of add-ons and extensions for Firefox and Chrome to turn them into excellent tools for finding and listening to music.

Tired of slogging through Facebook's interface? Sick of seeing the Fail Whale? Cut through the cruft and simplify your social services with Gwibber -- a microblogging client for Linux that supports Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

It seemed like they'd be ice skating in Hades before Apple would bless a real competitor to Safari on the iPhone, but Opera Mini has made its way into the App Store. Now that Opera has sailed past the gatekeepers, what's the verdict?

Stick a fork in the desktop, it's done! Recently Google demoed a port of Quake II to WebGL and HTML5, showing that even first person shooters are suitable applications to run in the browser. While the tide isn't going to turn all at once, it seems more likely than ever that a browser-based desktop is a viable option and ultimately the way many users will experience all applications.

It's Google's Internet, we just use it. Well, maybe not, but some days it seems that way. Google's gone from searching the Internet to being a big chunk of it. The latest moves from Mountain View include adding OAuth and contextual gadgets to email. Good on the surface for Google users, but what do they mean for everybody else?

When other mailers aren't doing the trick, it's time to break out Claws: An extremely configurable and extensible GUI mailer that gives you all the control you'd ever want over your mail without sacrificing ease of use.

It's popular to hate on IE8, and easy to do! But the truth is, Firefox could take a few cues from stodgy old Internet Explorer. From user-friendly features to deployment tools, there are still a few things that IE does better.

Bring the mightiness of Vim to Firefox! If you're ready for a fully keyboard-driven browser, the Vimperator add-on for Firefox can help you do away with mouse-based drudgery and add the awesomeness of vi-like keybindings to Firefox 3.5 and later.

Google Chrome has only had extensions available for a few months, but it already has a great collection of add-ons that will boost your browsing experience. We look at a handful of extensions that let you manage tabs effectively, learn more about the sites you browse, and read feeds with panache.

Chrome is catching up to Firefox pretty quickly in the extension department. The Chrome Extension Gallery has added more than 2,700 extensions in just a few months. Meanwhile the Mozilla team is busy perfecting Jetpack to make life much easier for add-on developers. With the 0.8 release out the door, let's look at what the road ahead looks like for Mozilla Jetpack and the future of add-ons with Mozilla.

Google is having another go at a social media offering, and this time it looks like the company may be on the right track. Google Buzz was rolled out en masse this week, to largely positive reviews. The service has a few rough edges, but has quite a bit of potential.

Looking for a new flavor of Web browser? If the mainstream favorites aren't doing the trick, or you just want to test drive something new, we take a look at several of the "alternative" Web browsers for the Linux desktop.

Spending most of your workday in Firefox? Most of us live in the Web browser for day to day work, so it's important to make it as productive as possible. With the help of a few add-ons and Web services, you can easily double your productivity in Firefox.

Picture a "test pilot" and you'll probably imagine a dashing personality ready to risk life and limb in order to test the latest technology. The Mozilla Test Pilot program is a lot like that, except you don't have to risk life or limb, and it might not give any great stories to tell at the bar. But you could help the project with very little effort, and isn't that almost as good?

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Opera hasn't cracked double digits in the desktop browser market, but that doesn't mean the company is giving up. A few days ago, Opera released alpha builds of Opera 10.5 and made them available for download. If the alpha release is any indication, Opera is going to give Firefox and Chrome a run for their money, speedwise.

Break out the Champagne and get ready to celebrate the winners of the Web in 2009, and give a few shots to the losers. Looking back on 2009 on the Web, we saw some tectonic shifts in the market and major developments that are going to make 2010 very interesting indeed. Grab your tickets and we'll see if you picked the winners for 2009, but if you bet heavy on Microsoft, you might be disappointed.

Not to sound like a Luddite, but sometimes the old ways are best. When it comes to Web browsers, that's not very often, but knowing your way around a text-mode browser like w3m does come in handy from time to time. You probably won't want to switch, but after taking a look at what you can do with w3m, you might want to add it to your toolbox.

If you like Google Chrome's speed, but miss the extensibility of Firefox, you're in luck. The Chrome team announced the developer program around Chrome Extensions this week, and unveiled part of the site that will eventually serve as the official mothership for Chrome add-ons. If you can't wait until then, we've got a round-up of resources for unofficial scripts and extension that should keep you occupied until the wraps come off.

The big news of the week: Google Chrome OS is out in the wild. Sort of. If you're willing to roll up your sleeves a bit and do some work, you can get your hands on Google Chrome OS, but it's not quite ready for everybody just yet.

After nearly a year in development, openSUSE 11.2 is ready to be unleashed! A peek under the hood shows a lot of new and interesting changes since 11.1, including updated desktops and a preview of WebYaST.

Mozilla Labs is continuing in its quest to make it as easy to extend the browser as it is to write a Web page. The latest update to Jetpack came out this week, and brought a few new APIs and a gallery of community contributed Jetpacks. There's been quite a bit of progress, but Jetpack isn't quite there just yet.

Firefox 3.6 development is moving along nicely, if a bit tardy. The first beta was expected in mid-September, but it finally dropped right before the end of October. How's 3.6 look? It's not a major leap from Firefox 3.5, but it has a few nice features and is showing decent improvement in JavaScript performance.

You don't have to take the Web as-is, you have the power to change it! With a few handy add-ons for Mozilla Firefox, you can take control of the sites you visit and make them look and work the way that you want to.

Opera recently released a beta of its next browser update, Opera 10.10. Of note in this release is Opera Unite, finally enabled by default. Opera is showing signs of progress, but is Unite all it was initially cracked up to be?

After chomping at the bit to get a Google Wave invite, the reality leaves a bit to be desired. While Wave has some interesting features and a slightly new take on collaboration, the current implementation has little to offer beyond what you'll already find in tools like EtherPad and Google Docs.

Gmail has changed the way we think about email, mostly for the better. Lately, though, Gmail has become notorious for its problems rather than speedy search and its "never delete mail again," storage allotments. It might be time for a tough love approach.

After far too long in development, Thunderbird 3.0 seems to be nearing the home stretch. We take a look at the latest test builds for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4. Is it worth the wait? Despite the sluggish development cycle, signs point to yes. Read on for how Thunderbird can help you manage your inbox.

Having trouble keeping up with your social media? The TweetDeck crew released a major update to the "social dashboard" this week that adds support for Facebook and MySpace. Now you can update several major services and bring order to your social media universe.

What does the next-generation feed-reader look like? Probably a lot like Snowl, a project out of Mozilla Labs that bills itself as a tool to follow and participate in online discussions. We take a look at early release of Snowl to see how it's coming along. It's not perfect yet, but the long term future for Snowl looks good.

Social media addict or social media newbie? Either way, we've got four must-have Firefox extensions that will make using popular social media sites much easier and more seamless within the world's most popular open source browser.

Firefox just keeps moving on. After hitting the billionth download, you might think the project would sit back and relax a while, but not so much. This week, the Mozilla Project released 3.6 alpha 1, which mostly focuses on speed improvements. Is it better than 3.5, or Google Chrome? Let's take a look!

Meet the new boss, not quite the same as the old boss. While Google Chrome isn't likely to unseat Firefox as the browser of choice for most Linux users very soon, recent development builds are showing a great deal of promise.

The Mozilla Project's long-awaited calendaring app is about to see 1.0. After five years of development, the project released 1.0 beta builds this week. We took Sunbird for a spin to see how it manages our time.

Everything old is new again, goes the saying, and I guess it's true. This week the Seamonkey Project released the first beta for the Seamonkey 2.0 Internet suite, a project that continues the tradition of the Netscape Suite with code from the latest releases of Firefox and Thunderbird under the hood.

Firefox is the perfect browser, right? Well, it's probably the best on the market -- but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Firefox has several annoyances -- some large, some small -- that we'd like to see fixed for 4.0.

Mozilla is at it again. Not content to slug it out on the desktop, the Moz folks are taking a run at the mobile market with Fennec. The betas released last week suggest that they're on the right track.

Opera has stepped up the browser heat with Unite. The fledgling technology launched on top of the Opera 10 beta is an interesting collaboration tool that might just change the way users look at the Web browser.

By releasing Safari on Windows, Apple is doing more than providing a rich browser experience for Mac users -- it's making a land grab for the Internet, and may pose a threat to Firefox as it attempts to displace IE. Does Safari 4 measure up to Firefox 3.5, and should the Moz folks be worried?

Opera has done well with mobile, but can it take the desktop by storm? Opera 10 beta 1 was released last week, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at Opera 10 to see if it can make some noise next to Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome.

One of Firefox's great advantages is the ability for users to create custom extensions. While add-ons have historically been non-trivial to write, Mozilla Labs is looking to make this considerably easier with JetPack.

The latest Firefox may still be in beta but it boasts a number of behind-the-scenes features that will make developing for the web easier as well as end-user changes that add new functionality, like private browsing and support for drag and drop.

With Firefox marketshare now above 20% and rising fast, can the KDE Project's browser, Konqueror, compete? Recently I started running KDE 4.2.2 and decided to use Konqueror in place of my default browser  Firefox. Let's see how Konqueror stacks up.

One of Firefox's greatest strengths is that it can be extended to provide additional functionality to the end user. However, the vast number of extensions available for Firefox can be a bit overwhelming. We look at that top 10 Firefox add-ons that can improve your productivity on Linux.

Disruptive technologies meet staid businesses. Stuart Cohen is bringing the open source development model together with big business, and finding it to be a perfect fit. Joe Brockmeier talks to Cohen about the Collaborative Software Initiative's first year, and where it's going from here.

So, now that the dust is starting to settle from the news that Sun is buying MySQL for a staggering $1 billion pricetag, let's take a look at the larger picture-- how is consolidation going to affect the open source ecosystem? MySQL was the first project in 2008 to be absorbed this way, but it certainly won't be the last.

This week we spent some time talking to Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, and External Projects Developer Liaison Jorge Castro, about the Ubuntu community, Personal Package Archives, and where Linux is headed in 2008.

In this podcast, Ted Ts'o, the Linux Foundation's newly appointed Chief Platform Strategist, takes a few minutes to talk to Linux Magazine about his new role with the Linux Foundation, the status of Ext4, the Linux Standard Base, and more.

No doubt you've heard the prediction before  "this is going to be the year of the Linux desktop." At the risk of being repetitive, though, I'm going to go ahead and say it: 2008 really could be the year of the Linux desktop.

After months of media-built hype, the mythical "gPhone" was unveiled this week as Android, a Linux-based software stack for building mobile phones. Despite the disappointment, Android might be just what the market needs, if the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) can actually get an open stack shipping on real devices.

Every year, Linux Magazine starts the new year off with a look at the top 20 companies that we think will be particularly influential in the world of open source software. Our editorial crew has some strong opinions in this area, but we're also looking to Linux Magazine readers to sound off and tell us what companies will lead the way in 2008.

VMware made announcements yesterday that might spell an end to one of the biggest problems facing Linux: Hardware compatibility. If you think you missed the hardware compatibility announcement yesterday, don't worry: The answer lies in VMware's ESX 3i, the Open Virtual Machine Tools announcement, and the announcement of a draft specification for a portable virtual machine format.

Linux Magazine is looking to find out a little bit about your organization's IT infrastructure. Do you use virtualization? Is green computing a priority? Is your organization adopting multi-core CPUs or taking a wait-and-see approach to upgrades? What applications are the most important for your organization?

If you use Linux on your desktop, you may wonder if you're susceptible to those pesky software infections known as viruses, worms, and trojans. Well, like the doctor says, "There's good news, and there's bad news." Read this feature to learn your prognosis.

Imagine this scenario: you have twenty servers under your care, some running Red Hat Linux, some running Solaris, and a few machines running Debian. You want to make sure that all of the systems have the same network configuration, but you don't want to log in to each machine and make the changes by hand. Unfortunately, you also know that it won't be easy to write a simple shell script to automate the task because each system's layout is a little bit different. Making simple changes to all machines on your network, without automation, can be quite a hassle. Happily, that's what Cfengine is for.

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